All language subtitles for BBC.Mary.Beards.Ultimate.Rome.Empire.Without.Limit.1of4.720p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org.eng

BIRDSONG

The story of the Roman Empire opens
with a fairy tale.

Once upon a time, not far from here,

a princess gave birth to twin sons.

The King, her wicked uncle,

fearing that the boys would one day
become his rivals,

ordered his faithful servants to
throw them into the river.

But as it was in flood, they just
left them

in a basket at the water's edge from
where they floated downstream.

Rescued on the bank by a mother wolf
who suckled them,

they were later found by a local
shepherd who reared them as his own.

Their names were Romulus and Remus

and they went on to found Rome.

This small ordinary town in the
middle of Italy

became the centre of an empire...

..stretching from the fringes of the
Sahara...

..to the damp moorlands of northern
Britain.

From Spain to Israel,

the Nile to the Rhine...

..it has framed the geography of
modern Europe

and defined the way we think of
empire now,

'transforming the Western world
through revolutions in trade...'

This is one of the first examples
of globalisation.

'..agriculture...'

Just olives, olives and
more damn olives.

'..art, law and architecture.'

This is where even I get a bit
gobsmacked by Roman engineering.

'There are plenty of conquests
and defeats, too,

'battles and butchery.
But there are also bigger questions.

'How did it work? And what
difference did it make?

'Why did the Empire eventually fall?

'And how did it all come about in
the first place?'

Was it ambition? Was it just luck?

If we really want answer that
question,

we have to go back to what the
Romans themselves said about it,

to their doubts, their debates
and their conversations,

cos they wondered just as much as we
do about what set them apart.

'It's on the Appian Way,

'one of the main roads out of Rome
going south deep into Italy,

'that we first get a clear glimpse

'into the lives of the early
Romans.'

Buonasera. Buonasera. Grazie.

'A period long before the marble
columns and the Coliseum,

'and one that's often overlooked.'

This tomb was built 500 years after
the city was founded.

It's a very long way from Romulus,

but what's written here tells us
for the first time

what some Romans felt and thought,
what their mind-set was.

In a way, what we really know about
the Romans starts here.

This isn't Rome as we now
imagine it,

but it is the grandest thing
they could do at the time,

and back then it was new.

This is the tombstone of the first
man to be buried here.

Scipio Barbatus, that means
Beardy Scipio.

And it tells us a bit about his
excellent qualities.

He is "fortis, vir" and "sapiens,"

he's a strong, brave man,

but he's clever, he's wise.

This is...quite strange.

It says his appearance was
equal to his "virtus",

so his appearance was as good
as his virtue.

He really looked the part,
he cut a dash.

And it ends with his conquests.

He "Svbigit omne lovcana,"

he suppressed the whole of Lucania,

which is a region in South Italy,

"opsidesqve abdovcit,"
and he took hostages.

So it's very easy to see what
these people's priorities were.

But it's kind of more than that.

Because in some ways, this is just
a few lines of an epitaph,

but in another way, this is the
first short surviving

historical narrative from any Roman
that we have.

I mean, this is the beginning of
Roman history writing.

It might be 500 years after the age
of the founders,

but this is actually the first place
where we can really see the Romans.

We get a very vivid picture of a
people committed to conquest

and to the glory that came with
military victory.

But that's actually like everyone
else around them.

So what set the Romans apart?

With so little direct evidence

the best place to look for the
answer

is in the stories that they told

and their own elaborate speculations
on the city's origins.

And in particular in the mythical
story of Romulus and Remus,

the brothers suckled by a wolf.

It was continually told and retold

and it contained a message about
Rome's conquests and internal wars.

There's actually a little more
Roman history in the myth.

It'd be easy to dismiss the story of
Romulus and Remus

as if it was just a fairy tale,
just a myth,

and it certainly isn't history,
in our terms,

but that doesn't mean that it
doesn't have a lot to tell us

about how the Romans thought about
themselves,

what their cultural priorities and
anxieties were.

Why a wolf?

The story wouldn't have been
the same

if it had been a cow or a sheep.

It was the fact that they were
rescued by a ferocious predator

that revealed the destiny of the
twins.

Some Romans questioned the detail,

the Latin for wolf, "lupa",
also means prostitute,

so was it actually a prostitute
who came to the rescue?

But, in broad terms, they believed
that the tale was true.

In fact, when later they came to
inscribe in the Forum

a list of the names of all those
generals

who had scored the biggest or
bloodiest victories for Rome,

people like the Scipios,

who did they start the list with?

Romulus.

One person who's not on the list is
Romulus' twin brother Remus,

because it's said they had
a massive row

over where exactly to establish
the new town.

It ended up with Romulus murdering
his twin,

an act which reflected the bloody
civil wars

that would later blight the politics
of Rome.

It must be one of the oddest
foundation stories

in the whole history of the world.

Not only does it involve a pair of
twins, not a single founder,

but then one of the twins goes and
kills the other.

That's to say fratricide lay at the
very beginning of the Roman story.

Brother killing brother
was hard-wired into Rome.

Establishing his new settlement
on the Palatine Hill,

Romulus became its sole ruler.

Romulus' first problem

was that he had hardly any citizens
for his new city.

So he declared it an asylum, and he
welcomed criminals,

runaway slaves, the dispossessed and
the down-and-out

from the whole of Italy.

It's another strange aspect of the
tale.

Whereas the average ancient city

liked to imagine that its original
inhabitants

had sprung miraculously from the
soil of the homeland,

the Romans imagined that their city

had originally been a city of asylum
seekers.

It was an attempt to give a mythic
dimension

to one of Rome's later most
distinctive characteristics,

that it not only welcomed outsiders,

but that eventually it spread Roman
citizenship throughout the Empire.

Romulus' next problem was that he
had no women

and, therefore, his city had no
future.

But none of the people in the
neighbouring towns

were prepared to give their
daughters to be Roman wives.

They were actually nastily insulting
and made no secret of the fact

that they didn't think a band of
runaways was great husband material,

so Romulus had to resort to a trick.

So the story goes,

Romulus invited his neighbours, the
Sabines, to a religious festival.

In the middle of the proceedings,
he gave a signal for his men

to abduct all the young women
among the visitors

and to carry them off as their
wives.

This is the famous Rape Of The
Sabine Women

and it's an almost uncomfortably
frank image.

This woman here has been captured
and she's trying to get away,

but she's not going to make it.

This one has already collapsed.

And another is trying to flee but
it's hopeless.

The rape might have been a response
to a terrible Roman humiliation,

but it was still a violent assault.

These women are not willing,
they're victims.

It's an instant that the Romans
discussed and debated

and displayed ever after.

Some of Rome's enemies

said that this was absolutely
typical Roman behaviour.

If they wanted something, they just
went out and grabbed it.

In the story, the families of the
Sabine women, as you'd expect,

hit back at the Romans

in what would be Romans first war
and first victory,

which was commemorated in a rather
strange monument

at the heart of the city.

Most people walk straight past here,

but it's where the Romans were
convinced

that the heart of that battle took
place,

in what became the Forum but what
was then not much more than a swamp.

And they marked the spot

where one of Rome's first enemies
fell to his death.

This was just one of a series
of monuments

that imprinted the origins of Rome
onto the face of the later city.

If you wanted, you could go up onto
the Palatine Hill

and see what was supposed to be the
hut of Romulus himself.

It was still a tourist attraction
in the fourth century AD.

The myths of Rome were there
for all to see

and with them the problems
of being Roman -

fratricide, rape, violence
and constant conflict.

fratricide, rape, violence
and constant conflict.

Rome at the beginning was ruled
by kings,

Romulus and six others to follow.

But the citizens eventually rejected
what they'd come to see as a tyranny

and established a kind of democracy

in which every year the people
elected officials

to govern the city and fight its
wars.

And soon after that there were signs
that Rome was beginning to grow.

Why is it that an ordinary little
town by the Tiber

became something much, much bigger
than that?

The honest truth is, we don't know
WHY it happened,

but we do know WHEN.

We can almost touch it. Almost.

SHE LAUGHS

Because in the early 4th century BC

the Romans built this massive city
wall around their town.

Now, there's more to this than just
defence,

this is a big statement that
Rome has arrived.

And even more interesting,

a lot of the stone they used to
build it

came from the territory of a little
town a few miles up the road

that they'd just taken over.

This is one of the first hints of
Roman expansion.

Rome's growth didn't stop at its
walls,

it expanded beyond them deep into
the Italian peninsula.

But we shouldn't imagine Romans
crowding around maps,

plotting world domination.

For a start, they didn't have maps.

And, in any case,

there weren't any more militaristic
than their neighbours.

Early Italy was a violent place.

So the question isn't
why they went to war,

but why they went on winning?

On the traditional pattern of
warfare, to put it a bit crudely,

every year the lads of one place
would go out

and do over a neighbouring town.

And if they hit lucky, they'd come
back with slaves and cattle.

It wasn't really organised warfare,
it was glorified raiding.

What the Romans did was establish
permanent relationships

with the people they beat.

Of course, they came back with
slaves and cattle,

but they demanded for the future

that the defeated towns should
provide troops for the Roman army.

And that cumulatively gave them
a huge advantage,

cos in the ancient world

it wasn't hi-tech military hardware
that counted,

it was how many boots you could get
on the ground.

THUNDER

As a city on its own,

Rome could never have dominated the
whole of Italy.

What's crucial is the relationship
they formed with other people.

Rome not only conquered, but it
incorporated its enemies.

And that's what's unique.

By the 3rd century BC,

Rome could call upon more than
700,000 soldiers.

And how they secured that manpower

can be seen on the city's
first gold coins.

Jonathan Williams is the Deputy
Director of the British Museum.

What is going on here?

I can read "Roma," Rome, underneath.

but there's a very complicated scene
above

that I can't quite work out. OK.

So what we've got here is we've
got a couple of men here

standing either side of another man

who seems to be kneeling down
holding something in his arms.

And what he's holding is a pig,
an upturned pig.

Now, this is a pretty strange scene
to us,

but any Roman would have known what
this was meant to represent.

It's a scene of oath taking,

promises being given and accepted
between two sides.

And this is how the Romans did it.

Strange to us, but it's clearly

a kind of meaningful ceremony for
your Romans.

Some people think that this might be
a mythological scene,

the oath being taken by Romulus,
the first king of the Romans,

together with the Sabines, one of
the earliest alliances

the Romans made with one of their
allies.

But it could more generally just be
a reference

to that whole system of alliances

between the Romans and all the other
peoples of Italy

that were so important in the
foundation

of the ways in which the Romans
came to dominate and rule

the whole of the Italian peninsula.

And so what this coin is doing,
in a sense,

is kind of...it's broadcasting,

or sort of creating an image of Rome

as the...the centre of these
alliances with other peoples.

Absolutely. Yes. It's broadcasting
messages to the allies,

but also to the Romans themselves
about... "How faithful we are.

"We're good solid, loyal allies,
but you'd better stick with us,

"cos you don't want to know what
happens if you split on us."

Rome's expansion was more improvised
than planned.

From the small walled town

to a patchwork of alliances
with friends and conquered foes,

Rome controlled most of Italy.

And from that, the Romans soon came
into conflict

with the other great superpower of
the day - the city of Carthage.

Because there was actually another
empire out there to rival Rome.

The Romans' network of alliances

put pressure on them to intervene in
support of friends and allies

further and further afield.

It's a bit like what happens to
modern superpowers.

One particular request for help had
defining consequences.

During a dispute between two
Sicilian towns

different groups appealed to Rome
and to Carthage.

After intense debate in Rome

between those spoiling for a fight

and those who thought Rome was far
better off out of it,

the Romans decided to go in.

And that was how Rome and Carthage

first came face-to-face in conflict.

Across a narrow strip of water,
the island of Sicily,

more Greek that Italian,

became the setting of Rome's first
overseas war,

a naval war against the Western
Mediterranean's

most powerful seafaring state.

The Romans hadn't had or needed
fighting ships before.

The story goes that what they did

is find a Carthaginian ship and copy
it over and over again.

It was a big turning point.

And in 241 BC these waters were
crowded

with the dreadnoughts of the ancient
world

fighting it out in a final messy
battle.

Hey, George, we actually found it.
All right!

LAUGHTER
It's another amphora.

It's the wreckage from this battle

that marine archaeologist Jeff
Royal and his team

have been discovering and raising
from the seabed.

It's really quite difficult to make
sense of this.

I've been looking at it ever so hard

and I keep thinking that every
little rock on the bed of the sea

is some bit of Roman or Carthaginian
military equipment.

But when you actually come across
one of these amphora

just lying there, you know, the
detritus of the battle,

it really hits you in the face.

You're seeing it literally as it
fell, as it were, with your own
eyes.

It's quite extraordinary.

What's the most memorable thing
you've come across like this?

The rams are always memorable,
because it's...

it's a really big deal to have found
them.

And it was one of the objectives of
the survey.

And, of course, yeah, when we see
'em it's...it's always exciting.

Built into the ships' bows,
these rams did exactly that -

rammed the enemy vessels.

But what we've seen from the
evidence

is obviously there was a lot of
destruction at sea level

or sea-surface level. Yeah. So all
of that is spread out,

the helmets, the rams. The rams
themselves all have frontal damage.

Now, you get 11 rams...

So they're actually going
head-to-head? Or hitting something.

Basically, you just run into each
other? It's just... Yeah.

It's like kind of the dodgems
without the dodge? Yeah.

Your sightlines at sea

and the speeds that they would have
been going,

you had an hour and a half, an hour
and 45, nearly two hours,

to see that this is going to happen.

You've got time to change your mind?
Yeah.

And if you don't change your mind
and you lose,

everyone on the ship's dead? Yeah.

It's thanks to Jeff's work

that I can get my hands on some of
the actual remains of this battle.

This extraordinary object is one of
the bronze rams

that would have been fitted to the
front of the ships

underneath the water line.

This one clearly did pierce an enemy
ship,

because part of a Carthaginian plank
is still fixed to it.

It's quite nicely decorated,

there's a helmet here, a kind
of helmet logo with feather plumes.

And all down here is a wonderful
trace of Roman officialdom.

It says "lucius quintius".

The quistal, that's the quality
control agent, approved this ram.

Sort of marvellous Roman
administrative efficiency.

Actually, a wonderful contrast with
the one Carthaginian ram

that's been discovered, which
has on it instead,

"Oh, may the god Baal," you
know,

"strike your ships and make a hole
in them."

In some ways the most interesting
and most moving object

to have been discovered is this
helmet,

a Roman helmet,

and it came complete with its
cheekpieces,

which would have protected the
fighter's face.

And it brings you about as close as
you can ever get

to the individuals who fought

and, in this case I imagine, died
in that great battle.

I suspect I might be the first
person

to put this helmet on since 241 BC.

Whoever...wore it must have had
a bigger head than me,

or else there was a lot of padding
in it.

The end result of all this

was that the Carthaginians were
pushed out of Sicily altogether

and the island became the first
overseas territory

under Roman control.

In a way, you might say that the
Roman Empire began here.

Rome defeated Carthage twice more.

First was the famous occasion
when Hannibal

pulled off the stunt of crossing
the Alps with his elephants

only to lose out eventually
on all fronts.

The Romans finished the job years
later in 146 BC.

Whether they were really anxious
about Carthaginian recovery

or simply wanted to show their
muscle,

they launched an expedition to
North Africa

under one of the Scipios and they
razed the city to the ground.

As one hardline senator had
repeatedly insisted,

"Carthago delenda est" -
Carthage must be destroyed.

We don't know what actually drove
Rome

to annihilate the city of
Carthage.

They'd taken over most of the
Carthaginian Empire

when they defeated Hannibal,

so maybe it was a devastating
display of imperial self-confidence.

But 146 would also be remembered
for another city's destruction.

This was the year that Rome sacked
Corinth,

the wealthiest city in Greece.

146 would become ingrained in the
minds of every Roman,

the year when Rome became so
powerful

that it no longer had any serious
challengers left.

The destruction of two of the most
famous cities in the Mediterranean

changed the rules of the game for
ever.

There was still no sign of a Roman
master plan,

or that they really wanted actually
to governed anywhere,

but they now had more power than
anyone else,

even if they didn't really know
how to use it.

Basically, the Roman priority was
to get their own way.

But 146 was also an ambivalent year.

Some people certainly celebrated,

but others already saw it as the
beginning of the end.

There's a logic in the history
of empires -

when you get to the top,
you can only come down.

Carthage was wiped from the Earth,

but Greece was very different,

and it gave Rome something more
precious than economic profit -

its culture.

Conquest didn't just change the
people that Rome conquered,

it changed Rome, too.

And it was thanks to Greece

that Rome started to become full of
marble columns,

elegant statues and objets d'art.

This was the very beginning of the
Rome we know

and also the beginning of a
flourishing art market.

This was once a great piece of art,

it's a statue of Hercules.

He was part of the cargo of a
shipwreck

that's been recovered from the
seabed.

Not just him - there were more than
30 other marble statues,

some bronze ones, some exquisite
jewellery,

glassware, scientific instruments.

And they say they found the pips
of the very last olives

the crew ate before the disaster.

But from our point of view
what's important

is that this was a cargo of stuff,

one out of many thousands that was
making its way from the Greek world

on a one-way ticket to Rome.

ACTORS CONVERSE IN GREEK

The Greek world that Rome conquered
had a long history of art,

theatre and literature.

ACTORS CONVERSE IN GREEK

And many Romans felt the cultural
traditions of Greece

outclassed their own.

But Rome not only bought, plundered
and emulated Greek culture,

Romans wrote themselves into the
Greek story,

tracing their own origins

back to the mythical war between
Greeks and Trojans

and to the most famous work of Greek
literature of all - The Iliad.

One crucial character for the Romans
was Aeneas,

who played a rather minor part

on the losing Trojan side in Homer's
Iliad.

The Romans took the story of Aeneas
and ran with it,

making him flee from Troy and come
to Italy to found the Roman race

as a kind of ancestor of Romulus
and Remus.

It's almost as if they're saying

that they didn't just belong in the
Greek world,

but they actually came from here.

BIRDSONG

The story of Aeneas gave the Romans
a stake in the traditions of Greece.

But exactly how Greek to be was the
topic of the day,

with some conservative hardliners
arguing that soft Greek culture

was destroying old Roman values.

There's more to conquest than
conquest by sword,

there's conquest by book, by word
and by culture.

One Roman poet later claimed

that it wasn't actually the Romans
who conquered Greece,

but the Greeks who conquered Rome.

What he meant by that was the Greeks
were really the winners,

because Rome owed them such a
vast cultural debt

that went back centuries before the
conquest of Corinth.

But at the same time, it was Rome's
interest in Greek culture,

their study, their preservation
and their replication of it

that's played a big part in keeping
that culture alive for us.

In a way, I like to think Rome has
kind of given us Greece.

The Romans had now gained effective
control

over the entire Mediterranean,

the only people ever to have done
that,

not always by annexing territory,

but simply by being able to get
their own way.

We think of this empire as the land
around the sea,

but, actually, at the heart of it
there's the Mediterranean itself.

It's crucial to understand

what's going on across this huge
liquid territory.

We aren't talking just about

some nice little boats transporting
sculptures,

the problems of controlling this sea

were as important as the ones of
controlling Carthage or Corinth.

The Mediterranean was the Empire's
internal sea and main highway.

"Mare nostrum" they called it -
"our sea."

It was far cheaper and quicker to
travel on the water than by land,

but it was dangerous, too.

That's not just because all you'd
need was one storm

and you'd have lost everything,

there were also bandits and
hijackers

wanting to get their hands on
anything that was sailing,

not just goods, but people too.

It was a bit like a motorway
swarming with human traffickers.

Rome's overseas conquests

had turned thousands and thousands
of prisoners into slaves.

And that created a demand for more.

There were big profits to be made
out of the slave trade.

Delos was a huge mercantile
community

and people made loads of money here.

One Roman writer called it the
biggest market in the whole planet.

All sorts of goods must have passed
through,

perfumes and spices, sculpture and
furniture,

but Delos was most famous

for being the world capital of the
slave trade.

And one of the main suppliers of
that trade

were those bandits and hijackers
that the Romans called "pirates".

For the Romans, a pirate was
anyone you didn't like in a ship,

from small-time chancers to big-time
criminals more like the Mafia.

It was not an easy relationship

and those tough guys in ships proved
pretty difficult to control.

One day they were stocking your
market,

the next day they turned on you.

And that's exactly what we see here.

This is a wonderful pair of very
distinctively Roman faces,

sunken cheeks and wrinkly, both of
them looking a bit sinister.

It's kind of tempting to imagine

that they were involved in a rather
nasty form of business.

They're also in a pretty ropey
state,

they've been smashed and they look a
bit burnt.

And the reason for that

actually stems from a key moment in
the history of this place.

In 69 BC, the pirates came here,

they torched the place,

there was a vast fire and Delos was
destroyed.

Pirates had their impact at Rome
itself, too.

Fear of pirates provided a reason or
excuse

for the Romans to take a decision

that would set the scene for big
political changes

that would undermine their democracy
and herald one-man rule.

Pirates were certainly a nuisance
and sometimes dangerous,

but the threat could always be
manipulated

to justify military action.

The war on pirates was a bit like
the war on terror.

And in 67 BC, the Roman people

voted almost unlimited powers to
one man to clear the sea of pirates.

And that man was Pompey.

Pompey the Great, as he was known,

got rid of the pirates in just
three months,

and then turned his firepower

onto some fabulously wealthy eastern
kings,

returning to Rome with a bang -

a spectacular two-day parade
and a massive carnival.

The victory parade was one of the
biggest street parties

the Romans ever celebrated.

There was the general processing
through the streets in his chariot,

there was all the beauty and spoils
and riches

he brought back home
out in front of him,

and his prisoners walking there,
too.

The idea was that the people
in the city

should be able to see
what the generals and armies

had been getting up to abroad and
what they'd brought back.

Some people thought the display was
terribly vulgar,

and on occasions people cried in the
audience

as they watched the poor prisoners
go past.

'But for most Romans this was a
chance to let their hair down...

MARY SPEAKS ITALIAN

Not bad.
MARY LAUGHS

'..and to indulge in the riches that
had been won for them.'

With the party long gone,

not much trace of Pompey's
triumphant is left behind,

but tucked away in a corner of a
museum

we can see one member of that
spectacle's supporting cast.

It's not often that you can actually
track down an individual object

that was trundled through the
streets of Rome

in a triumphal procession.

In fact, this is probably the only
one.

Its great bronze urn

was probably used for mixing up wine
and water and honey.

And it's actually got the name
of one of the kings

who Pompey defeated
scratched into its rim.

This makes me pretty certain that
this was one of the treasures,

one of thousands upon thousands,

that the people of Rome watched go
by in Pompey's parade in 61.

The Empire had been traditionally
funded, formed and governed

by democratic officials serving for
one year, sharing power.

The idea had always been to stop
anyone becoming a king again.

But with Pompey, the Romans

began to shelve their rejection of
individual power.

If you needed to defend or
extend the Empire,

perhaps you had to hand over control
to just one man.

Yet for a man who
revolutionised Rome,

he's left very few visible traces.

This is a wonderful bit of Roman
street archaeology.

You might miss it to start with,

but the layout of these buildings,

this sweeping curved facade

actually matches ancient Roman
foundations underneath.

And those foundations belonged to

a huge semi-circular auditorium
of a theatre.

These are the traces of the theatre
that Pompey put up

with the profits of his eastern
campaigns.

And they're the first time ever

that Roman buildings begin to match
the Rome of our imaginations.

Huge, monumental, magnificent,

designed to impress.

Pompey set the benchmark

for what an imperial building should
look like,

and one that later emperors would
follow.

But he's never become a household
name,

he's always been overshadowed in the
quest for glory

and the competition for personal
power.

The one person that forever after
stole the limelight

was his great rival, Julius Caesar.

MARY: Blimey!
SHE LAUGHS

Off we go. Never done this before.

SHE LAUGHS

Going in the opposite direction to
Pompey, Caesar headed west.

Where Pompey had been so stunningly
and bloodily successful out east,

and had come back with such a load
of cash and spoils,

Caesar, if he wanted to rival him,
had only one option,

which was to have a great conquest
himself.

But in one important way Caesar
really outdoes Pompey.

Pompey has big victories,

Caesar has big victories AND writes
about them.

And the reason why we can go to
Alesia,

the site of one of Caesar's last
victories there,

is because we actually have
Caesar's own account of it.

At Alesia, the army of Gauls
had set up camp on a hill.

In Caesar's own description, he
seems in complete control.

"Camps were constructed at strategic
points," he writes.

"Pickets were stationed day and
night.

"There was hard fighting on both
sides.

"I had two trenches dug.

"I erected a rampart and a
palisade."

When you see the scale of it all...

Is that despite what he claims
when he writes the story up,

Caesar couldn't possibly have had
his eye

on all the areas of this
battlefield.

In the end, winning an ancient
battle

comes down to strength of numbers,
starving the enemy out,

surprising them from behind

and perhaps most of all, the truth
is, it comes down to luck.

Luck or not, I'm sure that Caesar
himself would be delighted to know

we still read his own version of
these campaigns.

However he won the battle,

the real point is that HIS story has
lasted for centuries.

And in terms of Imperial propaganda,

it's a nice proof that the pen
really can be mightier,

or at least more enduring, than the
sword.

The leader of the Gauls in their
doomed last stand was Vercingetorix.

Since then, he's become a hero of
modern France,

a freedom fighter standing up for
the French nation.

The irony is that everything we know
about Vercingetorix

goes back to what Caesar wrote about
him.

In a way, our Vercingetorix is a
Roman creation.

Whatever he was really like,

the point was that Caesar needed
to show

that he had defeated a dangerous,
brave

and ultimately worthy opponent.

The Romans would never have thought

that there was any kudos to be
gained in beating a sissy.

Caesar also boasted about the number
of Gauls

that his army had killed during his
campaign.

Modern estimates come to around a
million.

His figures may have been sexed up
to impress back home,

but there's little doubt that
Caesar's ambition

to surpass Pompey's glories

had been achieved through nothing
short of genocide.

Excavations of the battlefield have
unearthed some of the weapons

that won Caesar his victory,

including the ancient version of
land mines.

These things aren't exactly hi-tech,
but they're very, very nasty.

This one in particular.

You have to imagine standing on it
in your leather sandal.

The point goes right through and
into your foot

and you can't pull it out because of
that little barb there.

Your foot's bleeding, you can't get
your sandal off,

you're in agony, you can't move.

It makes my toes curl just to think
about it.

There were people in Rome

who got anxious about what was going
on in Gaul

and at the level of the killing.

And some of Caesar's enemies even
went so far

as to suggest that he should be put
on trial for war crimes,

and that the judge and jury should
be all Gauls.

The Roman Empire was a pretty brutal
thing,

but there were some levels of
brutality

that even the Romans couldn't stand.

Julius Caesar would never have made
it

without the loyal support of his
troops.

They were far from the cattle
raiders of the early city,

the soldiers were now professionals

bound to their general as he was to
them, even more than to the state.

And unlike Pompey,

Caesar was prepared to use that army
to seize control of Rome.

For his part, Caesar was well aware
that his enemies in Rome

were conspiring against him,

that they were trying to back him
into a corner

and as he put it - to undermine his
dignitas,

that distinctive Roman combination
of prestige and clout.

So he took a chance,

and with one of his legions he set
out to march on Rome.

When he got to the River Rubicon,

which marked the border between Gaul
and Italy,

he said, "Let's throw the dice in
the air, then."

In other words, "God only knows
what'll happen next."

Some Romans saw this as the legacy
of Romulus and Remus,

the twins whose quarrels resulted in
the death of one.

Now a Roman fought Roman for
ultimate power.

Caesar's return to Rome triggered a
chaotic civil war

that engulfed not just Italy but
most of the Empire.

MARY SPEAKS ITALIAN

Pompey himself ended up dead on the
coast of Egypt,

his decapitated head presented to
Caesar

who, so we're told, burst into tears
at the sight of it.

Caesar won the war and was made
officially - dictator,

sole ruler of Rome.

But he didn't last much longer.

If there's just one Roman that
everyone knows it's Julius Caesar,

not because of what he did but
because he died.

His assassination has been blown
up into an heroic scene

that we all know or think we know
from films, paintings and plays,

and from those famous last words,
"Et tu, Brute?"

which he definitely didn't say.

What we know for sure is that he
was ambushed

by a group of his friends in a
meeting in a Senate house

that ironically had been built by
his great rival, Pompey.

It all happened just over there,
where that tree now is.

It was another echo back to Rome's
foundation story,

now it was Caesar who took the part
of the murdered Remus.

It's the most famous political
assassination ever,

carried out in the name of liberty,

just a few weeks after Caesar
had been made dictator for life.

Too soon to know whether
he'd succeeded or failed.

But the fact was that the
assassins may have got rid of a man

they thought of as a tyrant, but
they didn't get rid of tyranny.

It was all too little, too late.

By now, it was inevitable that the
Empire would be ruled by one man.

The question was, what shape
would that one-man rule take?

That was defined by the man who
established autocratic power

long-term and who we call
First Emperor Of Rome -

Gaius Julius Octavius,

or, as he later called himself,
Augustus.

That name actually doesn't
mean very much.

The closest you can get is
"Revered One".

But he worked out the do's and
don'ts of being a one-man ruler.

In the early third century BC,
Scipio Barbatus, on his tomb,

could have his career summed up in
just a few lines.

300 years later, the Emperor
Augustus wrote his own epitaph

to be displayed outside his tomb...
in hundreds of lines.

It's...an extraordinary overblown
accounts of "what I did".

But it also offers a blueprint of
how to be an emperor in the future.

And there are three things
he stresses.

First of all, you have to be
massively generous

to the Roman people.

You have to give them hand-outs and
entertainments and services.

And that's what he lists here,
all the cash he spent on that.

But then, you've got to build,
build, build.

And that's really
the model of Pompey.

And Augustus tells us about the
temples that he constructed

and the theatres.

But most important of all -
and this is what the biggest

part of the document is about -
you have to invest in conquest.

And Augustus explains how
he extended

the boundaries of the Roman Empire,

how he pacified the provinces of
Gaul and Spain,

how he pacified the Alps.

The message he's hammering
home is clear -

if you want to be a Roman emperor,
you have to look like a conqueror.

However much the Romans tried to
avoid the Pompeys

and the Caesars of this world,
the problems of governing

and policing an ever-expanding
Empire proved that decisions

taken by committee didn't work.

It wasn't the emperor that created
the Roman Empire,

it was the Empire that
created Roman emperors.

Augustus's account of what he did
is a practical toolkit for how

to be a Roman emperor.

But the ideology behind it all
is best represented on another

monument he put up
celebrating pax - peace.

So this is an altar of peace.

It's celebrating the security

and the prosperity that
the Roman Empire can bring.

But it isn't really peace
in our sense of the word.

This isn't about the absence
of fighting,

it's about peace that is
the RESULT of fighting.

This is peace that has been
won by victory.

Really, this is an altar of
pacification.

It's also more than that.

Built out of marble by the best
artists in town,

you couldn't miss the messages here.

The walls around it are covered
with friezes, some depicting

Augustus with his family, carving
the Imperial dynasty into stone.

And some of the images spread
the idea of his divine birthright,

projecting his lineage all
the way back

to the mythical founders of Rome.

On either side of the main steps,

there are two different
versions of Rome's ancestry.

On one side, the wolf
with Romulus and Remus,

and on the other side, Aeneas, who's
just arrived in Italy from Troy.

There's a special resonance
for the Emperor here

because Augustus claimed to
be directly descended from Aeneas.

But there's an even bigger point if
you take these two scenes together.

On the one side there's Romulus,
who welcomed into his new city

outcasts and runaways.

On the other side, Aeneas,

who really did come from abroad.

The message about Rome's origins is
clear -

Rome was always foreign.

This made perfect Roman sense.

The stories they told of their own
origins

reflected the growing diversity,

expansion and openness
of their world.

And there was one corner
of the Empire

that had a particular resonance.

I'm in the place that many Romans
thought the whole story

of their city began. It's more than
1,000 miles away from Rome.

It's the city of Troy,
the city of the Trojan War,

that most famous, most defining
war in the whole history

and myth of the classical world.

It's the war of Helen, Achilles,
Hector and the Trojan horse.

It was also the birthplace
of Aeneas.

And for the new Augustan age,

the Roman poet Virgil elaborately
reimagined and rewrote Aeneas's

journey from Troy to Italy
in his epic poem, the Aeneid.

He was using myth to explore
the complexities of the rise of Rome

and of its Empire.

There are all kinds of things
in this poem -

love, honour, heroism and Empire.

Virgil also points to
some of the much more disconcerting

sides of Imperial power.

At the end of the story -

and it's really the last thing we
see Aeneas doing - our hero cruelly

and gratuitously slaughters an enemy
soldier who has surrendered to him.

It's as if in Virgil's hands,

the story of Aeneas both
celebrates Rome's Empire

and exposes its potential brutality.

And yet Virgil could also present
the Roman Empire as a gift

from the gods themselves.

At the very beginning, Jupiter,
the king of the gods,

prophesies Rome's future power.

"I have given," he says, "I have
given the Romans imperium sine
fine."

"I have given them
empire without limit."

It hadn't really started that way.

A completely unremarkable city had
expanded far beyond its walls,

becoming the power
centre of a vast Empire.

And from the twins to the emperors.

From cattle raiders to
organised armies.

From the early victories of
Scipio Barbatus to the crushing
destruction

of Corinth in the east or the bloody
killing fields of Gaul in the west.

Through a combination of
improvisation, good luck,

greed and ambition,

Rome has imprinted on our minds
what it means to be an empire.

The idea of empire without limit is
something that Scipio Barbatus

could never have understood.

He knew all about conquest
and military glory

and the profits that came with them.

But Rome having territorial control
over swathes of the outside world,

thought of as limitless,
would have been

absolutely incomprehensible to him.

Two and a half centuries later,
Virgil's Aeneid

claims that Jupiter himself had
planned it that way.

It's as if Virgil, looking back,
is reinterpreting the messy,

the improvised history of Roman
conquest into some grand design

of manifest destiny.

Now that Rome had acquired
an empire, what to do with it?

It was a terribly exploitative
system of resources,

of landscape and of people.

What would feed it
and what would connect it?

We tend to joke when we say,
"All roads lead to Rome".

But actually they did.

Who would lose out and who
would succeed?

One of the biggest things he did
was put up this huge amphitheatre.